00:00:00 ◼ ► What's on your mind, MG? Anything happening in our mutual interests, like, in the last few weeks?
00:00:06 ◼ ► No, not at all. I tried to, like, leading up in the sort of half an hour time before we're chatting, I'm trying to, like, go through the news and I couldn't possibly get to it all. It's all happening in real time. There's, like, new, obviously there's always new AI stuff rolling out, but then with regard to Apple specifically, there's a lot going on and some of the other tangential AI stuff might end up being related to what's going on with Apple right now.
00:00:31 ◼ ► I've had a bigger week than usual. I mean, I'm laughing, and I've talked about it on Dithering a little, and it was nice. Like, when I feel like podcasting works best for me, it's like it gets some ideas unglued for me, and then I write them out.
00:00:54 ◼ ► And when it works worst for me is when I feel like, well, I got that out of my system on the podcast, and then I never write it. And I do. I really do feel, I mean, some people are so much better at podcasting than I am, or just broadcasting in general.
00:01:10 ◼ ► And those people are called, like, TV stars, right? I am a writer who podcasts. And it's a thrill to me, and it's still a bit of a surprise that so many people like listening to my podcast, and I enjoy doing it. But it's like, if I haven't written it, and I haven't really gotten it out of my system.
00:01:28 ◼ ► I know that's true for you, because you still have avoided the giant movement of putting the videos of these out there, right?
00:01:41 ◼ ► Yeah, and that's, I'm not like, I don't know, never say never. And I guess I could. I mean, I'm looking at you right now. I mean, we have video, and I could just record it.
00:01:54 ◼ ► And I guess, you know, I know a bunch of shows. I think this is what ATP does. I don't know. I don't listen to podcasts on YouTube, but I think there's some that instead of putting video of the talking heads, they just put album art up.
00:02:06 ◼ ► People just like using YouTube as the audio player. That I could definitely do. I guess it would just add a little step.
00:02:13 ◼ ► So I guess, you know, it's a shout out to, you know, if you're only going to listen on YouTube, I'm not going to hear from you, because you're not going to hear from me this, because this isn't going to go on YouTube.
00:02:23 ◼ ► But if you would prefer that I also publish these episodes on YouTube, I would love to hear from you. Tell me.
00:02:30 ◼ ► And tell me if it really makes a difference to you, whether it's just album art or not.
00:02:35 ◼ ► Because the other thing is, I like seeing you. For years, I did this show just over Skype with no video.
00:02:48 ◼ ► The little bit of eye contact and hand gestures that we can do this way, and like I could put up a finger and be like, hey, hold that thought for a second.
00:02:58 ◼ ► I think it helps. I mean, I think it's only better. Even for a purely audio show, I think it's better.
00:03:03 ◼ ► But I also like the idea that I can invite guests on this show and they don't have to shower or worry about what's in the background behind them or whatever.
00:03:13 ◼ ► Like it's a slightly, it is, it's a big, I feel like it's a bigger ask when somebody asks me to be on their show.
00:03:20 ◼ ► I'm totally with you. I don't have my own podcast, but as a guest of many podcasts, I definitely would lean towards not releasing video of these things.
00:03:29 ◼ ► But I think it's just, it's inevitable. Like Spotify's, you know, now pushing hard into this space.
00:03:34 ◼ ► Apple will do it in 15 to 20 years, I'm sure, at the rate that they change their podcasting technology cadence.
00:03:44 ◼ ► Because I think it's like, ultimately, like you said, whether or not people want to watch or not, it's like discovery too, right?
00:03:50 ◼ ► YouTube is so great for that. And so it's just another audience that you're sort of leaving on the table by not doing it.
00:03:56 ◼ ► Yeah, I, and I got some pushback on it before. I mean, we have a lot of, I mean, I really don't want to digress too far.
00:04:01 ◼ ► But I posted a thing yesterday linking to David Shore, the, I think, extraordinarily talented pollster.
00:04:10 ◼ ► He's a Democratic pollster, but I think what makes him good is that he's very data focused.
00:04:22 ◼ ► He was on Ezra Klein's podcast and taking Goddard linked to it and just some of his takeaways.
00:04:28 ◼ ► Well, you know, one of the many things was just that TikTok was extremely, seemingly, noticeably influential in the last election.
00:05:09 ◼ ► And the one before that, even with Obama winning reelection over Mitt Romney, was actually a little closer than everybody.
00:05:17 ◼ ► Sort of thought it was going to be right up until it like the last one that was sort of easy win was Obama over McCain.
00:05:36 ◼ ► On the one hand, I think he shot himself in the foot because I think it ruined McCain's own brand.
00:06:01 ◼ ► Somebody on that side who like after he kind of lost pretty badly in the election and they were like, yeah, it was your fault.
00:06:18 ◼ ► Putting aside any thumb on the scale that ByteDance slash the Chinese government might have had algorithmically about, you know, having a preferred candidate in this election.
00:06:36 ◼ ► And amongst people who answered yes, they leaned decisively, you know, and where I mean decisively, I mean, like, eight percent or something like that towards Republicans.
00:06:57 ◼ ► And if people are on tick tock or if they're listening to podcasts on YouTube, then that's where I need to take my podcast.
00:07:14 ◼ ► No, I mean, one last thing I'll just say on it is I do and like I do actually watch some podcasts every once in a while on YouTube.
00:07:21 ◼ ► And I would just say, I think that the thing, at least in in sort of not the tick tock generation, but sort of the elder generations, maybe that that it resonates with, but certainly with younger generations, too, is just like everyone knows that by now the podcast that sort of has resonated as like the quote unquote hang.
00:07:38 ◼ ► You're hanging with these people like it feels like you're their friend group and like the video just sort of adds that element.
00:07:43 ◼ ► Even if you're not seeing anything particularly interesting on screen, it's like a visual connection, just like you're talking about with you and I.
00:07:53 ◼ ► And I feel like some people probably watch it for that very reason, not to see, yes, stunning visuals or how great everyone's hair looks and all that.
00:08:14 ◼ ► And even, you know, the weird part that has no evolutionary basis before electronic digital media is the listening to people who you can't also talk back to.
00:08:27 ◼ ► I mean, that's obviously a last hundred years type thing, but, you know, you could imagine a scenario 100, 200, 300, 400 years ago where somebody is like, you know, doing busy work in the blacksmith shop or something.
00:08:51 ◼ ► Do it, you know, hang out in the pub with people who are saying and talking about the same weird things that you're interested in.
00:09:10 ◼ ► Before we dig into all this stuff, let's just knock one of these sponsor reads out and then we'll start digging in.
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00:10:52 ◼ ► I knew I was on to something with that something is rotten in the state of Cupertino piece, and I somehow successfully, and I think to my credit, and I'm glad, but I think I know.
00:11:06 ◼ ► I vastly underestimate the resonance with which it was going to hit when I published it.
00:11:20 ◼ ► There's not a lot that I can share other than that it is definitely circulated at all levels of the company.
00:11:37 ◼ ► I mean, we can talk about Gurman and some of the high-level leaks that he gets, but, I mean, I'm not going to hear what Craig Federighi thinks of it or Jaws.
00:11:52 ◼ ► But I can say it definitely circulated, and at times in the past, and maybe I'm foolish, but I know that I have influence and that people in Apple read me and listen to me and that I can make swaying arguments.
00:12:05 ◼ ► And it's such a silly little example, and I try not to take credit and brag about my influence or whatever, but a couple of years ago, there was the thing where Safari, to me, inexplicably, didn't put the fav icons in the tabs in Safari.
00:12:24 ◼ ► And I wrote about that, including the fact that after I'd started writing about it, I, like, made the best case I could for, like, why this is obvious, that Safari, the tabs in Safari should show the fav icons for the websites, including the fact that I had heard from a bunch of people, readers, who said, you know, it's the only reason I use Chrome, is because I can't stand not having the, you know.
00:12:49 ◼ ► Like, if that's the reason you were using a different browser, that's really pretty bad.
00:12:58 ◼ ► Not because of me, not, like, to make me shut up, but because they read me, and I think I made a good case.
00:13:13 ◼ ► But, I mean, I think, hearing you talk about that, I think that's somewhat analogous to this situation, obviously, at a much different sort of scope.
00:13:20 ◼ ► But still, it's like, what you're doing, and I think what resonated with people with your Something Rotten in the State of Cupertino piece, is it sort of is a...
00:13:31 ◼ ► It just brings together a lot of what it feels like the broader Apple ecosystem is feeling at the moment, right?
00:13:38 ◼ ► And so, it feels like, obviously, as writers, many people try to do that, but there's times when it actually hits, it's the right time for it, right?
00:13:52 ◼ ► Of, like, the outside of Apple world, of what everyone's sort of thinking about, and what needs to be said in a relatively succinct manner.
00:14:01 ◼ ► And I think, in this case, it just came together for me in a neat way, where I was like, here are the points I want to make.
00:14:10 ◼ ► And a lot, yeah, I'm sure you feel the same way when you get going on a longer piece, where it's like, it winds up different than you thought at the outset, right?
00:14:17 ◼ ► You've got, like, some notes, the five or six points you want to hit, and you feel like they go together.
00:14:22 ◼ ► And by the time you've gotten to the end and done a proofreading pass, it's like, huh, this is actually kind of different.
00:14:28 ◼ ► Oftentimes, writing, for me, is thinking, sometimes my opinion changes in the course of writing it out, where I was thinking, no, Safari is fine without fav icons.
00:14:39 ◼ ► And then by the time I got done writing, I was like, no, they should definitely add them.
00:14:55 ◼ ► But it's, the other thing I think that I did, and I really tried to, is to give everyone at Apple responsible or involved the benefit of the doubt every step of the way in what I was arguing.
00:15:11 ◼ ► I think I said this on Dithering, to me, that's not pulling punches, and I don't think that, I don't think we'd be talking about the piece if I pulled punches on it.
00:15:25 ◼ ► Like, I'm still selecting, I would just want to hit these three points because I feel like these are definite strikes, right?
00:15:31 ◼ ► These are the aspects of this series slash Apple intelligence, long-term and short-term over the last year, where these are balls right over the middle of the plate.
00:15:43 ◼ ► And there's some tangential points that maybe inner strikes, and I could hit those balls too, but I'm going to leave them out of this piece just so that I can say, these are the ones that are just obviously, I don't see how you can argue with this.
00:16:02 ◼ ► One, you know, at an even step back level, it's like the same thing is probably true where if you always write negative things or you always write positive things, obviously about a company or a specific topic, like, it just drowns out.
00:16:21 ◼ ► You call back to the Adam Lashinsky article in Fortune, I think, right back in 2011, but he was talking about the 2008 situation with MobileMe, and that's what led to the famous thing, which you cite Lashinsky talking about, where Steve Jobs said, our friend Mossberg is writing bad things about us, right?
00:16:40 ◼ ► And when I was reading your piece, my mind immediately went there, not to butter you up, but with you, right?
00:16:46 ◼ ► Where it's like, you can imagine internally, it's like, Gruber is writing bad things about us.
00:16:50 ◼ ► Not that you're doing it either on purpose or unfairly, but it's more to the point of like, yeah, exactly.
00:16:57 ◼ ► If he's talking this much, for lack of a better word, shit about us, something must be wrong.
00:17:20 ◼ ► It's like, I am not going to say that I'm the new Walt Mossberg, because I don't believe it.
00:17:33 ◼ ► But I realized that by including that part of it in the story, it's without me saying it, it's implicit.
00:17:47 ◼ ► And it's, again, nobody's going to say, and I can talk about Walt Mossberg easier than I can talk about myself or more freely, right?
00:17:55 ◼ ► Nobody that I know of, with any sense, would argue that Walt Mossberg ever was in the bag for Apple, right?
00:18:08 ◼ ► And again, to use the Michael Jordan analogy, like, with me writing a site that's largely about Apple starting in 2002, that's a good, it was a really good time to start writing a site largely focused about Apple.
00:18:24 ◼ ► And that my site got more popular right around 2006 into 2007 when the iPhone came out.
00:18:32 ◼ ► It's a really good time to have already built up an audience writing about this product.
00:18:36 ◼ ► And yes, a lot of what I wrote and have written over the years about the company is complementary to their work.
00:18:44 ◼ ► But when people bring that up, like, it is like the old, like, well, 50-50s even, like, that if I was an accurate columnist about Apple, half of my commentary would be negative and half would be positive.
00:18:57 ◼ ► And I think that is such a, our politics have gotten screwed up by that sort of thinking in ostensibly neutral publications.
00:19:07 ◼ ► It'd be like if you were writing about the NBA in the 1990s and half of your commentary about the Chicago Bulls was, I don't know if I like their chances this year.
00:19:31 ◼ ► And I mean, as someone who in my previous life, right, when I was a reporter, specifically when I was writing for TechCrunch, I got the thing left and right.
00:19:39 ◼ ► Obviously, it was always thrown at me, the Apple fanboy thing, which you get, which many people get, obviously, around this company in particular.
00:19:46 ◼ ► But the reality of the situation was that honestly never bothered me too much because, like, I was a fan of Apple.
00:20:01 ◼ ► You wouldn't have started Daring Fireball, at least with that specific focus, if you weren't, like, generally a fan.
00:20:11 ◼ ► It's like, yeah, just acknowledging, like, yeah, you can be a fan of things and there's a reason why you're writing about something and it's resonating with the audience because these people who are reading it are also passionate about this topic.
00:20:22 ◼ ► And, yeah, you don't want to, obviously, like, say something that's untruthful, but that's going to sort itself out, right?
00:20:28 ◼ ► Like, you would lose your audience if you were being dishonest and you were writing just things that were forced.
00:20:37 ◼ ► I love his Sunday night episodes in the NFL season talking to Cousin Sal about the day's slate of games and the betting line for the next week.
00:20:45 ◼ ► And it's like if you've been listening for years like I have, you'll notice he's a New England Patriots fan.
00:20:51 ◼ ► His take on the New England Patriots is very different over the last two or three years than it was four, five, six years ago, right?
00:21:01 ◼ ► He's not trying to tell you that this year's Patriots team was just like the old days, as good as ever, you know, just rotten luck that they only got three wins or four wins, whatever they wound up with.
00:21:15 ◼ ► Just listening to him complain about them winning the last game of the year because it sunk their draft.
00:21:24 ◼ ► That's a great segue, though, to tell you about is, I mean, just to like dive right into it, is in having written that now, is what you're sort of leading to there with that Simmons analogy is like, is Apple and it's post Brady and maybe Belichick, if you want to consider the two together, era, right?
00:21:43 ◼ ► Well, and that's where it, to me, is more fun, gratifying, or why I do what I do, why I write about this rather than about sports, because the sports results speak for themselves.
00:22:00 ◼ ► And you win or lose, you get in the playoffs or you don't make the playoffs, and when you're in the playoffs, you either win the championship or you don't.
00:22:07 ◼ ► And you can get to a situation like in the AFC championship game this year where there's a big fourth and one play, and the refs give the Bills kind of a really sketchy spot on one play.
00:22:22 ◼ ► And it's like, and then Bills fans can argue about it, and I think they got screwed, but also I think that if the Bills didn't want to be there in that situation where one call from one ref can tank the season, they should have had like a 10-point lead at that point.
00:22:44 ◼ ► And, you know, as shown in the Super Bowl two weeks later, it was possible to build up a lead against the Kansas City Chiefs.
00:22:52 ◼ ► So, yes, I acknowledge it's like an impossible question to answer because it's not sports.
00:22:59 ◼ ► But that's where I think Apple has talked them into, I think, internally has sort of talked themselves into a problem is that there aren't scores like that, right?
00:23:24 ◼ ► A lot of times the real question becomes, is that a leading indicator of something that's really problematic?
00:23:34 ◼ ► So if it's a sports problem, it's harder to call out the problem while the team is still winning games.
00:23:42 ◼ ► But here's a case like with Siri where and this whole Apple intelligence thing and all of the sort of unforced errors involved with this where I kind of feel like large and small, like 15 years of Siri.
00:24:05 ◼ ► It was the only thing built into a cell phone where you could talk to it and ask simple questions.
00:24:22 ◼ ► It was so long ago for you that I actually had a scoop about it at TechCrunch way back in the day.
00:24:28 ◼ ► It was post-Apple acquiring Siri because, you know, it started obviously as a separate startup.
00:24:33 ◼ ► But the scoop I had gotten, and I was looking at the post recently, it was entitled Legends of the Fall.
00:24:43 ◼ ► But basically, I got word from a source way back when that it was going to be not only a part of whatever the – it wasn't even called iOS at the time, right?
00:24:59 ◼ ► That it was going to be, like, the focal point, like, the main thing that they were going to talk about for the new operating system.
00:25:07 ◼ ► But I don't think people understood, like, how integral it would actually be to the system.
00:25:22 ◼ ► And this sort of speaks to, like, when I was reading your post, my sort of take on it was, like,
00:25:27 ◼ ► you were mad at yourself because – and kicking yourself because you felt, like, hoodwinked a bit, right?
00:25:33 ◼ ► By this whole notion that Apple was going to launch this thing and it was going to just do as they showed in that canned demo.
00:25:46 ◼ ► Because just everything we've seen for the past 15 years from Siri has not worked as it's supposed to.
00:25:56 ◼ ► It's just how – where on the range from bad to mediocre will it fall was my expectation.
00:26:03 ◼ ► With the open mind or strong opinion loosely held, which is, like, an adage I really try to live by, especially in my work,
00:26:14 ◼ ► And my skepticism leading up to that amazing debut of it working as well as it could be imagined
00:26:48 ◼ ► Because, again, like you just hinted at, I honestly think looking back on it, the signs were all there.
00:26:54 ◼ ► And, I mean, and however insightful people think I might be or want to give me credit for having written this piece in the middle of March 2025,
00:27:11 ◼ ► It just seems so clear to me in hindsight, but it should have been clear right at the beginning, in June at WWDC,
00:27:20 ◼ ► that it wasn't just some of the features were being demoed in hands-on briefings and some of them weren't.
00:27:38 ◼ ► And instead, because heretofore in the recent years, Apple's always shipped what they said they were going to ship in the coming year.
00:27:59 ◼ ► Who ordered the code red in order to let this get out there and let this be announced on stage?
00:28:04 ◼ ► And then, of course, the whole marketing nonsense that came afterwards, which is another debacle into itself.
00:28:10 ◼ ► On one hand, in a way, this is also almost a good thing in a very small way that Apple didn't ship it, right?
00:28:18 ◼ ► Even though they have this history of buying it and they must have felt like immense pressure to do that because of everything you're talking about.
00:28:26 ◼ ► And so, in some ways, it's maybe a little reassuring that they knew that it wasn't ready to go and that they could.
00:28:39 ◼ ► I'm glad you brought that up because if there's one thing I cut out of my piece, I didn't have it written, but it was in my notes.
00:28:45 ◼ ► And I thought I would get to it was that exact angle of who was still pushing into this year within Apple that they should or could ship this this year.
00:28:57 ◼ ► And our friend, and I don't know if we'll have time to talk about him on this show, but I mean that in some sense, sincerely, like Mark Gurman.
00:29:05 ◼ ► Again, it's sort of like this idea of polarity that you're either all in on somebody and all you say is good things about Apple or you're all the Apple sucks and they're fraud and all you say is bad things.
00:29:18 ◼ ► Like, both things can be true that I believe he is a singularly well-sourced reporter regarding Apple who single-handedly, continuously, and just in the last week, he's had at least two bangers that prove a week.
00:29:38 ◼ ► But, you know, throughout the last few hours, single-handedly reports things based on sources he has within Apple that nobody else has.
00:30:03 ◼ ► Yeah, there are other reporters with sources who get scoops, and a scoop gets famously overused in headlines, exclusive when it's not really exclusive.
00:30:16 ◼ ► And at the same time, I think Mark Gurman has cultivated an aura of being an oracle and an all-knowing seer who knows everything that Apple is doing, and that if you follow him and read his, like, weekly newsletter, you'll know everything Apple is going to do, and that everything he prints or speculates about their upcoming products is true.
00:30:45 ◼ ► He said a week before the Apple Watch 9 came out, Series 9, that it was going to have flat sides and a flat front or flat top.
00:30:57 ◼ ► He said just this month that the new $350 iPad was going to have the A17 Pro chip because it would have Apple intelligence.
00:31:15 ◼ ► There is – you can go back to the report where he wrote that, and there is no correction at it.
00:31:22 ◼ ► Like, everyone, I think, who's listening to this knows your longstanding sort of beef with Bloomberg as a whole, right?
00:31:44 ◼ ► But I would say, like, to some of your points, like, I would imagine that at Bloomberg – and now he's basically – you know, he got a promotion.
00:31:58 ◼ ► But as you've pointed out in the past, like, Bloomberg is an interesting place because it's tied to the Bloomberg business and the Bloomberg terminal.
00:32:04 ◼ ► And there's such a priority based on scoops because they care about market-moving information and data.
00:32:13 ◼ ► And, like, even if you weren't versed in what's going on sort of in the newsroom and stuff, you would be able to tell just by reading enough Bloomberg articles that they clearly prize that above all else.
00:32:24 ◼ ► And it leads to, like, this weird incentive structure of, like, leave Gurman out of it.
00:32:28 ◼ ► I think, like, in general at Bloomberg, they often have this weird incentive structure where they might reach for things a little bit more because it will be market-moving.
00:32:38 ◼ ► Like, obviously, I don't think that there's anyone sort of pocketing – any journalist pocketing.
00:32:54 ◼ ► And that incentive structure, the longer he's there, has sort of shifted his reporting.
00:32:59 ◼ ► And I think that incentive structure also leads to the bizarre and, to me, unique to Bloomberg culture of never acknowledging mistakes, even when mistakes have happened.
00:33:09 ◼ ► It is unusual for other people in the media to call on and make fun of the mistakes of others.
00:33:17 ◼ ► And if Gurman printed retractions or even just tweets, like, oh, I got the A16, A17 wrong in the iPad thing.
00:33:27 ◼ ► Or if he can say how it happened or something like that, then it would be a lot less likely that I would link to it or make a show of it.
00:33:35 ◼ ► Like, if he's not going to acknowledge the mistakes, it opens the door for me to do it.
00:33:39 ◼ ► But at the same time, that doesn't mean I think everything he writes is trash or is wrong.
00:34:16 ◼ ► But I'm pretty sure it was like in February, he said, hey, there are some rumblings that these features are going to be delayed.
00:34:31 ◼ ► That Federighi has voiced that in his testing of the features as they stood, they were not working as advertised.
00:34:44 ◼ ► But Apple in recent, I don't know, 5, 6, 7, 8, I don't know, some number of years, has sort of been on a pretty consistent annual schedule with iOS releases.
00:35:02 ◼ ► Like, one thing I think undeniably you could say about Federighi is he's made the trains run on time in a way that they didn't used to at Apple.
00:35:10 ◼ ► But it's a dot O in September for the iPhone because that's the thing of the year that is the least likely to move and is a sign of real trouble that they don't.
00:35:29 ◼ ► I think they were like October instead of September in that screwed up COVID year is the most extraordinary achievement of the Tim Cook, Jeff Williams operational mission.
00:35:45 ◼ ► There's surely a book about just how, I guess, I don't know what that was, the iPhone 11, whatever it was in 2020, but whatever year that was, there could be a book written just about that.
00:35:58 ◼ ► And I think it would be like a Cracker Jack read and a business school book for the ages of how they did that.
00:36:20 ◼ ► And then the features that didn't make it start coming out in dot two, dot three, December, November.
00:36:33 ◼ ► These advanced Siri features have been scheduled for iOS 18.4 pretty much since June, right?
00:37:01 ◼ ► And again, it's less of a put your finger on it, got it exactly right, but heard the rumblings.
00:37:06 ◼ ► And in hindsight, it nailed it that there were people in Apple saying, hey, I don't think this stuff can go in 18.4.
00:37:16 ◼ ► And German's report was that it's going to be delayed maybe till 18.5, which would be like, I don't know, May or June.
00:37:34 ◼ ► And that's because I don't think that's not the sort of thing German would get, but he knew something was up.
00:37:38 ◼ ► And it seems like he knew that Federighi was the one inside raising his hand or shouting, saying this stuff isn't ready.
00:37:47 ◼ ► So to go back to your question from 10 minutes ago, who inside Apple was Federighi arguing with?
00:37:53 ◼ ► Who was saying, oh, no, we should ship it, whether because they thought it was actually shippable or just for the stubborn principle of, well, we said it was going to ship.
00:38:03 ◼ ► And if if it even if these tires don't hold air, we're going to put them on the car and put it on the road.
00:38:09 ◼ ► And that gives you, again, some level of hope that still at the very least, that level of both awareness and rigor remains at Apple that they're not going to ship something that isn't ready, like because it would be bad for consumers.
00:38:32 ◼ ► And this the situation with Siri is now such and we've already hit on it 15 years in the making.
00:38:46 ◼ ► And by the way, we should talk about like the little the side sort of bar, even of what German reported was that like there's some whispers that they might just scrap this stuff altogether.
00:39:09 ◼ ► But that sort of plays into directly the latest news of sort of the reshuffle of the org.
00:39:16 ◼ ► Can Mike Rockwell now come in and actually sort of in the Federighi style get the trains to go on time?
00:39:23 ◼ ► Because it seemed like for better or worse, John Giandria just wasn't able to do that here and what that means going forward.
00:39:35 ◼ ► Let's put a tack in that and say preview of later on the show and just go back to because if there wasn't anybody inside who is saying, yeah, we could still ship this in 18.4 or 18.5 at the latest.
00:39:55 ◼ ► Why was German still why was German writing in February that there was an argument happening within Apple?
00:40:01 ◼ ► So who somebody I really without being able to name names, I don't have any little birdies telling me who was doing it.
00:40:18 ◼ ► And to me, that speaks directly to like a broader potential issue here, a bigger picture issue of like.
00:40:25 ◼ ► And it actually ties directly back to the callback to the Steve Jobs days of mobile me.
00:40:30 ◼ ► And it's like the reporting when you, you know, and looking back on it now, it seems clear that part of the reason why mobile me was a disaster and happened as it did is because Steve Jobs had just taken his eye off the ball with that.
00:40:52 ◼ ► And at the highest level, again, with this situation, it seems pretty clear that, again, at least from the outside, it's easy to say this, but it does seem to be the case that it's not like Tim Cook is making the call over whether or not they're going to ship the AI feature.
00:41:08 ◼ ► Like he delegates that out right to Federighi, like ultimately, it seems like it has been to his credit greatly.
00:41:17 ◼ ► So he's said it explicitly ever since he took the job, I think, on an interim basis, like, well, Steve Jobs was on a medical leave.
00:41:24 ◼ ► But certainly since he Steve Jobs died and Cook became the full time CEO and successor, that he's not a product person or designer and he doesn't try to be.
00:41:36 ◼ ► And that was clearly what led John Scully wrong to go back over 30 years was that Scully saw himself as a general product person coming from Pepsi.
00:41:52 ◼ ► You didn't have to be a computer person and I think was so in the shadow of Steve Jobs, even after Jobs had been forced out of the company, led by Scully and exiled.
00:42:15 ◼ ► And I had one, not the first one, but it was kind of good and useful, but also just sort of missing.
00:42:31 ◼ ► And including right down to the very, very close analogy of not even understanding your input.
00:42:51 ◼ ► But like when the Simpsons and Doonesbury were making not just cartoons about it, but ones that people like hung up and framed.
00:43:16 ◼ ► And you lose that the problem with tech credibility or credibility in general is what it's so hard to build and so easy to lose.
00:43:27 ◼ ► Where the later, the last Newton's ever made right before the Steve Jobs came back and was like, we got to get rid of this thing because we got to focus on what's good.
00:43:45 ◼ ► It didn't make you do the weird graffiti, learn a new shorthand language that Palm did.
00:44:51 ◼ ► It's still the most valuable company in the world right now, over $3 trillion in market cap execution machine.
00:45:03 ◼ ► And they're just – we're talking about law of large number problems predominantly with Apple these days.
00:45:11 ◼ ► But now that we're at these large numbers and iPhone growth slows and sort of it's becoming more services-based in terms of just revenue growth, I don't wonder – I know you think the same thing.
00:45:30 ◼ ► And predominantly now there's two examples that are key in the negative side, which would be the Vision Pro and then what they're doing with Apple intelligence.
00:45:39 ◼ ► It leads to the question of like does Apple need to either go back to a world in which there is a single signal caller like Jobs or is Apple too big for that to possibly be the case these days because Jobs did it at a much sort of lower threshold of number of products.
00:45:58 ◼ ► And so does there need to be that type of single person again or is it a question of getting those right lieutenants?
00:46:07 ◼ ► And I would probably argue certainly with AI given that this is like the world we're all living and breathing right now in real time.
00:46:15 ◼ ► I have a hard time believing even with the hiring of G. Andrea and some of the other people.
00:46:26 ◼ ► I just have a hard time believing that the current executive ranks, almost all of which date from the Jobs days, are able to make judgment calls about what is correct in AI right now is what I would say.
00:46:47 ◼ ► I forget somebody, I was in a group chat and somebody computed the average age of Apple's senior vice presidents right now.
00:46:54 ◼ ► And it's pretty high up there, like around 60 or something like that, you know, and they're all over 50.
00:47:07 ◼ ► And now that I'm 52, I definitely want to be less ageist and want to argue that you can be relevant.
00:47:19 ◼ ► If your whole starting lineup in the NBA is over 35 years old and you're losing games, you can't say it's because they're all too old.
00:47:34 ◼ ► It's like but the absolute domain expert in AI, which you need to be in order to make the judgment call of like whether the new Siri or the new level of Apple intelligence is ready to ship.
00:47:44 ◼ ► And the reality is that none of these people, as great as they have been and as successful as they have been in their careers at Apple, are in that position because of that success, because they've been in the previous generations of success.
00:47:57 ◼ ► That's where they couldn't have been like sort of brought up as, quote unquote, AI native or at least like very versed in the field.
00:48:03 ◼ ► And even Giandria, who I don't know, and so I'm like hesitant to speak to like too overtly.
00:48:09 ◼ ► But I do think like his world, it seems to me, is more in the ML space, right, than it is in this newer fangled world of AI.
00:48:18 ◼ ► Like whereas like and people would say like Apple's other levels of what you want to call AI, the older, slightly older variations of it have been great, right?
00:48:42 ◼ ► And I don't believe that Apple has the key people in place, at least making the decisions in order to make it where the product needs to go.
00:48:54 ◼ ► I'll stretch it beyond breaking point and say that there are like trends in sports, like when the three point line was added and the conservative coaches were like, yeah, you don't need that.
00:49:34 ◼ ► They don't just stand there three feet from the basket with their backs to it and learn how to do a skyhook because that's what Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scored 40,000 points with 40 years ago.
00:50:03 ◼ ► But why it didn't jump out to me from WWDC that these features that got canceled and thinking about the internal debate within Apple about promoting them early and why the cord wasn't pulled sooner than 10 days ago or whatever it was when they announced it.
00:50:20 ◼ ► Is there not just hard or more difficult or more ambitious or outside Apple's proven comfort zone?
00:50:29 ◼ ► And they weren't just undemonstratable, apparently, at the time, still undemonstratable to people in the press like me in September.
00:50:44 ◼ ► And I guess if there's another point I left out of my piece, it's that because it's too much of a distraction.
00:50:50 ◼ ► But it's not just, oh, we promised it would do X and then people bought it and we shipped it and it only does X 50% of the time or whatever the guy said in the meeting last week, two-thirds to 80% of the time or whatever.
00:51:04 ◼ ► It's the fact that these are features that involve these actions that involve Siri doing things for you, sending emails, right?
00:51:13 ◼ ► And so if you say, look up that restaurant where MG and I had lunch in San Francisco last June and send him an email asking if he wants to go back there again this June and instead Siri emails my mom a random picture.
00:51:36 ◼ ► I've had that experience, like I've had Siri message, I've literally had Siri call people that I don't want to have called.
00:51:56 ◼ ► Right, like it's one in the morning my time or one in the morning your time and I say, hey Siri, call Mark.
00:52:06 ◼ ► And instead it starts dialing MG, who I know is in London and it's already one or two in the morning.
00:52:12 ◼ ► You're my friend and you're not going to be really mad at me if I wake you up at two in the morning with a pocket call.
00:52:46 ◼ ► And obviously there was like and I'm curious if you've heard anything more about this because like I was looking into this a little bit.
00:53:18 ◼ ► I think that's just him being truly and genuinely the my favorite person to write or to read following this stuff as it comes because he's on top of seemingly everything related and really is pushing the limits of these things and has an open mind about using them.
00:53:38 ◼ ► But I think if that's the only thing Apple had to worry about, they'd be in much better shape than they actually are.
00:53:43 ◼ ► I think the problem is that that line from the serial hands meeting that German seemingly got like a recording of a transcript at the very least.
00:53:54 ◼ ► And I don't know how you get a transcript without a recording where Robbie Walker, the senior director who's in charge of Siri, you know, said something to the effect to the all hands that, hey, yeah, these features only work like two thirds to 80 percent of the time.
00:54:19 ◼ ► And it seems like maybe there was a, you know, a real emperor has no clothes moment where somebody had to break the seal.
00:54:30 ◼ ► The king said he has a nice set of clothes and he always does have nice sets of clothes.
00:54:44 ◼ ► It's like somebody had to call out like, hey, if this thing only works two thirds of the time, it can't ship.
00:54:51 ◼ ► There are some features that I guess could ship and it wouldn't do damage if they only work two thirds of the time.
00:55:00 ◼ ► But when it can email the wrong person or send you to pick up your parents at the airport at the wrong time or at the wrong airport, right?
00:55:21 ◼ ► Who's going to believe the answer that, hey, you should go pick up your mom at 130 at SFO without double checking it yourself?
00:55:41 ◼ ► With the earlier days of AI where it's like, is this stuff is sort of silly because like you're wasting time really if you have to always back it up.
00:55:51 ◼ ► And that speaks to the question of like, but do we believe that Apple can actually improve also and get this over the finish line?
00:55:58 ◼ ► And clearly internally, at least now, they thought that they couldn't in a timeline that is anything shorter than coming up in the next WWDC where they would ship things starting with the next release and into next year.
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00:58:15 ◼ ► So, you had mentioned that, so the news today, thank God, because we were spitballing days to record a couple days ago, and we talked about yesterday.
00:58:28 ◼ ► But this morning, or I guess it was late afternoon your time, around noon my time, Gurman had the scoop that Apple had.
00:58:35 ◼ ► They haven't announced, at least before we started recording this, they hadn't announced anything publicly.
00:58:40 ◼ ► And I checked with some friends inside, and they, the first they heard of the news was when Bloomberg published Gurman's story.
00:58:48 ◼ ► But that the shakeup is that, I think it's best encapsulated, I think it was such breaking news that the Bloomberg headline didn't really capture it at first.
00:58:58 ◼ ► Siri is going to shift from the GiAndrea ML AI division to Craig Federighi's regular software engineering division.
00:59:09 ◼ ► And the new person, Mike Rockwell, who, for the last seven years, maybe more, has been leading the team building Vision OS and the Vision platform.
00:59:25 ◼ ► Yeah, he's been there for a decade, and I think he found the Vision, what became the Vision project.
00:59:32 ◼ ► And I think he was a guest on my live, the talk show in 2018 first, maybe it was 2019, but I'm going to say 2018.
00:59:39 ◼ ► Long before there was a Vision platform, but talking about the VR stuff that Apple had started building out into iOS with LiDAR cameras and stuff like that.
00:59:52 ◼ ► He's going to be leaving that in the hands of whoever the hardware executive is there, and he'll be taking over leadership of Siri, and he'll now be reporting directly to Federighi for Siri.
01:00:11 ◼ ► No, I mean, the meta thing is also, like, as we've been talking about, it's fascinating that it seems like this was probably announced at the top.
01:00:20 ◼ ► The quote-unquote top 100 meeting that Apple does is famously done since the jobs days of all the time, lieutenants getting together on an offsite to help steer the direction of Apple going forward and whatnot.
01:00:37 ◼ ► I think Ehrman said, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe in his report, he actually said that this was in the works for a while, but they –
01:00:55 ◼ ► But this had been in the works for a while, and that leads to all sorts of interesting meta questions, too, and sort of internal questions about Apple where it's like –
01:01:06 ◼ ► So they obviously gave you the news that they were delaying everything, but they didn't tie it to a change at the time.
01:01:17 ◼ ► Like, wouldn't you want to put this all together and, like, make it a clean package of, like, look, there's – you've already said that there's stuff going wrong if, like, if you're delaying a major feature that you talked about on stage and have done television commercials for.
01:01:36 ◼ ► Because that's, like, after your report on – that's immediately what everyone started talking about, right?
01:01:47 ◼ ► And if Apple already knew that they were going to do something major, why would they not just talk about it then, which is very strange?
01:02:17 ◼ ► I don't – again, not with any sourcing or anybody who would or could possibly know Tim Cook's or the other senior vice president's thinking on this.
01:02:39 ◼ ► It's in the – okay, he added it – I think he must have added it after the fact because it's now – no, it's in – it's randomly in the – underneath the image of the article.
01:03:06 ◼ ► The AI management shift has been months in the making and predates Apple announcing the Siri delays.
01:03:20 ◼ ► In January, she officially moved over to the AI group and is a top lieutenant to Giandrea to oversee the – but again, like, if this was months in the making, why did they do this temporary move to put her under Giandrea if they were just going to shift out Giandrea?
01:03:34 ◼ ► Yeah, and that's possible and this could just be the proof that none of this leaked to Gurman deliberately or strategically, which I would bet my house on.
01:03:51 ◼ ► This isn't something that got given to him strategically and maybe that's the whole story.
01:03:57 ◼ ► I mean, because it is true that Kim Vorath had been before he announced – and again, that's a Gurman scoop – that she was coming in to look at Siri and evaluate it.
01:04:07 ◼ ► She, for the last several years, had been playing the sort of Scott Forstall role for Vision OS under Rockwell.
01:04:18 ◼ ► And again, not to take any credit from her, the reason she has so much credibility within Apple is that she played that role for Scott Forstall back when they made iOS, right?
01:04:35 ◼ ► What Scott Forstall was to iOS, I think Rockwell is now supposed to be for Siri and Kim Vorath is still the Kim Vorath.
01:04:49 ◼ ► But everybody I know who has an opinion on her and her references to her in Ken Kishenda's creative selection, she gets stuff done.
01:05:08 ◼ ► Like, I think it's a very different skill set to get iOS 1.0 out the door than to get a really good iOS 19 out of iOS 18, right?
01:05:24 ◼ ► And so the fact that she's been working under Rockwell and with Rockwell successfully, and we can talk about the fact that I think that's been very successful soon.
01:05:36 ◼ ► It makes sense that maybe that this was planned at the time, that go back to when the Kim Vorath's name popped up as going to Siri.
01:05:54 ◼ ► Let me see what the issues are before Rockwell comes in because that's going to shake everything up and I won't be able to tell what's actually working, what's not.
01:06:05 ◼ ► Yeah, and maybe it was already known between Tim Cook and Rockwell and Kim Vorath that Rockwell would be coming too, but it really was.
01:06:13 ◼ ► And, you know, Federighi obviously would know, but a very small group of people knew and they kept it quiet because Rockwell had to work on his exit from the Vision OS team and didn't want them to learn about it from Mark Gurman, which they ended up doing anyway.
01:06:29 ◼ ► But I do think, and I said this to you when you texted me before we did the show when the news broke, a quick takeaway is that this, to me, is Federighi winning a turf war.
01:06:39 ◼ ► And that this as a product, and I know this, and again, circling back to a question you asked me 45 minutes ago, what else have I heard from people at Apple about my article last week?
01:06:54 ◼ ► And one thing I've heard from, not from executives, but from like engineers and designers and people, enlisted level people, not an officer level people to put it in military terms is like, hey, thank you for calling this out.
01:07:11 ◼ ► And that within most Apple software teams and organizations, there has been a years long, just big WTF of what the hell is going on over in Siri town.
01:07:58 ◼ ► And then if you say, you know what, we're going to we're going to render these in a different part of the pipeline than we were otherwise.
01:08:38 ◼ ► And you work on Safari and then you have friends in the cafeteria, Cafe Max, who work on mail.
01:08:46 ◼ ► And maybe you can't talk about everything you're doing for next year because it's Apple and you have to be secretive.
01:09:00 ◼ ► But there's this whole other team for 15 years that has been held to a seeming half works is good enough for us standard that they've just been like, what is going on?
01:09:16 ◼ ► And yeah, those people being the most appreciative, because again, sometimes it takes an outsider to break through the just the cocoon that's that's enveloped around that entity.
01:09:27 ◼ ► And it does seem like because, again, as we've been talking about, like for 15 years, I mean, Larry David's making fun of this thing on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
01:09:39 ◼ ► It's like this is now the modern version of that has happened to Siri and it's become a laughingstock.
01:09:44 ◼ ► And they, you know, in all the keynotes and everything, and they talk up all the billions of things like.
01:09:54 ◼ ► And they're still OK with all of this ridiculousness that people know that it's sort of a laughingstock.
01:09:59 ◼ ► And that goes back to what we were talking about, where my fear with Apple would just be that they didn't know they don't have the right person, again, at the senior level to understand, you know, that they're not doing a good enough job.
01:10:15 ◼ ► And or to the earlier Steve Jobs point with MobileMe, it's like whoever that person should have been or was supposed to be just didn't really have their eye on it.
01:10:24 ◼ ► And maybe it's related to the fact going back to the G. Andrea point where it's like, well, he was more of like an ML guy.
01:10:29 ◼ ► And, yeah, it's all AI, but it's not really the same thing as what like Siri, which predates it, was trying to do.
01:10:34 ◼ ► And they've got a real problem that's very similar to what Amazon has been going through by all the reports on that before the new Alexa came out.
01:10:42 ◼ ► They have the very real problem of they had so much early success in gaining users, both Siri and Alexa, that they got sort of locked into this old technology paradigm that they then couldn't just abandon and had to move forward.
01:10:59 ◼ ► And Google had some of this, too, with Assistant, which they've been slowly working towards rectifying that.
01:11:04 ◼ ► But really, Amazon was at an incredible scale with purpose built devices for Alexa and then Apple at an even higher scale, not with purpose built devices, but with Siri on everything, a billion plus devices out there where it's like you can't just pull them out.
01:11:28 ◼ ► But it also speaks to the point of like there might not be someone who was like either around long enough on top of those groups and knowing the new stuff going on to really be able to rectify those two worlds.
01:11:47 ◼ ► And I think it's part of the power of maybe that I don't just spout off with every criticism of every single bug I encounter on Apple and expect it to be fixed.
01:12:08 ◼ ► I try and even when I'm tempted to, I often it's sort of like a little internal rule in the copy editing desk that only exists in my brain.
01:12:19 ◼ ► But then I think when I do like here's what he did when mobile me shipped and didn't work.
01:12:47 ◼ ► And again, you could even argue with mobile me that that wasn't even their first attempt.
01:12:52 ◼ ► And the reason they had mobile me instead of dot Mac was that dot Mac didn't work that well.
01:12:59 ◼ ► I mean, I'm sure you and I have talked about it at length on long ago episodes of the show that there was just this general consensus that Apple couldn't do online sync services right.
01:13:14 ◼ ► If it doesn't work, start over a second time, start over a third time, but don't give up on it because you can't say, well, we had our do over and we don't want to embarrass ourselves or embarrass the teams by doing calling for a third do over.
01:13:29 ◼ ► What's the alternative to just accept a system that doesn't work as advertised and yet have the company?
01:13:36 ◼ ► Reading your piece reminded me of that and reminded me of you specifically because we were I think we were together at the point where so Jobs does that thing in 2008.
01:13:55 ◼ ► And I look back at my TechCrunch coverage back at the time and my headline literally was it just works.
01:14:00 ◼ ► Like because that's what Jobs kept saying over and over again, like to drill it in a mantra into people's heads because he was genius at doing those types of like marketing pivots right on stage.
01:14:13 ◼ ► But here it was like basically like, yeah, they basically from that point of the meeting in 2008, it took three years to get to the point where iCloud was then ready to roll with it just works and Jobs could unveil it on stage.
01:14:27 ◼ ► And if Apple thinks that they can cut corners or whatever, and maybe that's what they thought sort of leading up to this, that, yeah, we'll just sort of like Siri's got some stuff that's working and we can't pull back timers and we can't do all this stuff.
01:14:53 ◼ ► And just think about how many people listening to this in their car having their phones go off.
01:14:58 ◼ ► But, you know, with Amazon, it sounds like they had to do the similar sort of internal thing, right?
01:15:02 ◼ ► Remember, they had promised a new version of Alexa was coming and then there were crickets for a year and a half.
01:15:14 ◼ ► But like at some level, they probably went back to the drawing board and said, like, we got to get this built rebuilt from the ground up.
01:15:31 ◼ ► I will call out to one one thing I wrote a while ago, which is that and I would love your take on this.
01:15:43 ◼ ► You basically let Siri keep doing what she, for lack of a better phrase, has been doing to date, which is the timers and setting reminders and things like that.
01:15:56 ◼ ► But for almost everything else, and certainly for like what day is it and the Super Bowl and all the world knowledge stuff, just outsource that to ChatGPT.
01:16:08 ◼ ► I have to believe that they would be able to figure out how to hash together some sort of agreement to basically then allow the Siri team that was work that would be working on the next Siri, the LLM version of Siri,
01:16:21 ◼ ► to go back to the drawing board and just sort of rebuild this thing for a year or two years or whatever it's going to take and really just rely on that ChatGPT partnership,
01:16:28 ◼ ► which is good enough now to do almost everything that you would ask Siri for that world knowledge stuff.
01:16:34 ◼ ► I think, because I went back, the other thing, I went back to 1997 and because Brent Schlender, who also had Fortune, the same place where Adam Lashinsky had his mobile me piece in 2011,
01:16:48 ◼ ► in 1997 had written a piece also using the Hamlet phrase, something's rotten, Cupertino, about a very different state of rottenness.
01:17:03 ◼ ► And I'm writing in 2025 about like one rotten apple that I would like to see the company get out of the barrel before the rest of it gets rotted similarly.
01:17:13 ◼ ► But rereading Schlender's being Steve Jobs, the chapter of 1997 reminded me of so many things.
01:17:22 ◼ ► But one of the things that was going on in 1997 at Apple was, wait, what was your question to me?
01:17:54 ◼ ► And so one of them in 1997, before he became the CEO or iCEO temporarily, but when he gave the famous Macworld Boston speech where Bill Gates was on the screen behind him.
01:18:07 ◼ ► And what people most remembered of that was Jobs' framing of, we have to get over this idea that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.
01:18:26 ◼ ► People remember Bill Gates promising five years of development for Mac Office, which is really important.
01:18:33 ◼ ► They remember the investment that Microsoft made for $150 million in non-voting shares of stock.
01:18:39 ◼ ► But the other part was Apple had agreed to make the default web browser Internet Explorer.
01:18:46 ◼ ► And when Jobs announced it, Mac users booed because the sort of people in 1997 who went to Macworld Expo were like, boo, Microsoft, right?
01:18:56 ◼ ► It was a really – and I wish – oh, how I wish that I had been writing about this stuff just a couple of years earlier so I could look back and say, yeah, I was never into that.
01:19:07 ◼ ► I really was worried that the computers that I liked were going to go away and I'd be stuck using theirs.
01:19:36 ◼ ► And it's like, I don't know, how does that seem like it would have worked out in hindsight?
01:19:40 ◼ ► And it was part of that – I think that might have been – the booing might have been – for the Internet Explorer might have been where Jobs said, we have to get over this idea that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.
01:20:21 ◼ ► And Ken Kishenda, his first job before he worked at iOS, was working on Safari for that team.
01:20:32 ◼ ► But basically, if it took five, six years for Apple to have the bandwidth to make their own browser and their own rendering engine, that stinks from the perspective of 1997, right?
01:20:48 ◼ ► And if the answer is that Apple, yes, Apple should own and control their own leading LLM.
01:21:00 ◼ ► But it's like when the doctor tells you that you should have started working out and losing weight 10 years ago.
01:21:12 ◼ ► And the practical decision is to who's the Internet Explorer of 1997 now that Apple should go with.
01:21:34 ◼ ► But it has – the current state of the deal has such an Apple holding its nose sink to it, right?
01:21:45 ◼ ► Like, I wouldn't be shocked if some of that is – I do believe that they were going to make an investment in OpenAI and that fell apart.
01:21:56 ◼ ► And by the reporting, like, it was specifically with Miramirati, who was potentially the one helping to broker that – or at least was a point person for some of that contact was out.
01:22:11 ◼ ► But the fact that they already have the deal in place I think makes this a little bit more seamless.
01:22:16 ◼ ► The fact you can basically already do it right now, you have to sort of annoyingly prompt specifically for ChatGPT every time you want to do it if you want to explicitly do it.
01:22:26 ◼ ► I'm just saying make it a little bit more seamless and it gives you the leeway to do what you're talking about, pull back.
01:22:34 ◼ ► I mean we have the Elon Musk XAI example of like they were basically able to spin up a fully functional LLM in say it was 18 months, 12 months, 18 months, whatever it ended up being.
01:22:45 ◼ ► They had to spend an insane amount of money and probably cut corners that Apple is not going to be allowed to cut if nothing else for like environmental stuff and all that.
01:22:54 ◼ ► But still, they could probably get it done in a couple of years if they really sort of put their resources into doing it.
01:23:07 ◼ ► They often do this like with Google and Google Maps in the early days and YouTube right on the original iPhone.
01:23:21 ◼ ► But until their chip is ready, which it's obviously getting close and they're finally shipping one version of it now, they have to sort of partner to do this.
01:23:29 ◼ ► And they have the history of just partnering until they get up the muscle internally to be able to do it and then they replace it.
01:23:38 ◼ ► I mean, I think they will be because it's billions of users who would potentially be flooding into the gates.
01:23:46 ◼ ► And when I wrote that, I think people wrote similar ideas of like, come on, they can't partner with OpenAI.
01:24:01 ◼ ► I think another thing to potentially talk about is if there's other sort of shortcuts to do it and it's a contentious point of like an acquisition, which they have not made a big splash in for a long time.
01:24:23 ◼ ► And now seems like a good break and it is another new sponsor, somebody who listened to my entity an episode or two ago where I said, hey, I've got some openings on the talk show for new sponsors.
01:24:46 ◼ ► And the basic idea is on the back of an OpenCase iPhone case is a detachable magnetic spot that you can cover with a piece of the case that will just make it seem seamless.
01:25:01 ◼ ► But you can take it off and it opens up on the back of the case a spot to the bare back of the phone that is exactly the size of like one of Apple's MagSafe wallets.
01:25:13 ◼ ► So that if you use a MagSafe wallet, instead of putting it on top of a MagSafe case and adding to the thickness, you put it into the open spot in an open case and it sits closer.
01:25:27 ◼ ► And you could then take that off and put, say, a MagSafe charging puck right on the back of the phone and you get a way better connection, a way better, stronger magnetic connection.
01:25:43 ◼ ► Like if you've ever thought to yourself, hey, am I losing and adding unnecessarily wasted heat and energy and charging a little bit slower when I charge by MagSafe through a case?
01:25:59 ◼ ► You can pass through the energy. And if you just think about it to a ridiculous degree, if you put a MagSafe case on top of a MagSafe case and put another MagSafe case on top of that MagSafe case and then connected a charger, obviously it's not going to charge as efficiently, right?
01:26:15 ◼ ► Adding even one layer between the charger and the iPhone is going to reduce efficiency a little.
01:26:21 ◼ ► OpenCase solves that problem really cleverly. He sent me, he did a Kickstarter, John Rocco is the founder. It's a very small company. It's just him and his wife who run the company making these cases.
01:26:31 ◼ ► Well, he sent me one and when he did a Kickstarter last year with last year's phones and I wrote to him and he even wrote this down that it really made him laugh because I wrote, I can't believe no one thought of this before.
01:26:41 ◼ ► And I still think that when I see it now, it is a, I can't believe no one thought of this case design. It is really clever. Just go to theopencase.com and you could see for yourself and you'll be like, oh, I get it.
01:26:54 ◼ ► And then you'll, I swear, you'll look at them if you use iPhone cases and you use MagSafe and you'll say, why did nobody look at this before? The cutout is exactly the size of Apple's wallet. So if you use an Apple wallet, it'll fit. You'll have to measure for other third party things.
01:27:08 ◼ ► But the compatibility is if it fits in the opening on the back of the case, it just works. So Apple's old MagSafe charger, the one, the lightning one that was like a battery pack, which I still love and keep and is like probably the last lightning device I'll ever use in my life because I still love them.
01:27:25 ◼ ► And Apple didn't make a replacement fits perfectly inside an open case opening. And for a battery pack where the efficiency really matters because you want to get all the energy out of the battery, it matters even more.
01:27:36 ◼ ► So they have great looking cases. They work great. They're super easy. If you have questions like, hey, does it like, does the, like when you don't want to use something, you want to put like a pop socket type thing on it. They have those. So you can put like a pop socket thing in the opening on the back of the case. Do they come off accidentally? No, it's the magnets, like everything in MagSafe tend to stay connected when you want them to stay connected and only disconnect when you want to disconnect them.
01:28:01 ◼ ► But when you want to make a direct connection to the bare back of your phone while keeping it in a case overall, open case is your answer. Really great product. Go check them out. And special deal. First time since their Kickstarter over a year ago that they've offered a discount at all just for listeners of the talk show.
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01:28:40 ◼ ► These are cases that more people who use cases should be talking about there. It's just a super clever idea. Very well done.
01:28:46 ◼ ► So we were to you were talking about the just punting to open AI. The other thing going back to the 90s. I mentioned this when I was on Jason Snell's upgrade last week before I wrote my piece, but I'm still thinking about it.
01:28:58 ◼ ► Like what got Apple through the lean years of the 90s? Maybe I'm biased because I was a graphic designer at the time, but the whole desktop publishing industry ran on Macintoshes.
01:29:10 ◼ ► And even when Adobe started making Windows versions of all their apps and it was just sort of, well, there's a version of Photoshop for Windows and there's one for Mac and they're file compatible.
01:29:24 ◼ ► And it was like a weird, bizarro world of corporate designers who were using those apps on Windows.
01:29:31 ◼ ► The Mac was the platform for desktop publishing and desktop publishing quickly, instantly took over the whole world of print.
01:29:39 ◼ ► Like it just went from a totally analog world of ink stained hands to a totally digital world of toner cartridges in like a snap of a finger because it was so much better and so much easier to be creative.
01:29:56 ◼ ► Apple never even tried to make like a Photoshop or a Quark Express for page layout or a vector design app like Freehand or Illustrator.
01:30:06 ◼ ► And big, successful companies, well, there were at least one, Adobe, which is still around, but there was Macromedia and Aldis who made PageMaker, which was a competitor to Quark Express.
01:30:15 ◼ ► And there were a whole satellite of smaller companies that would make plugins and extensions for Photoshop or for Quark Express or for Illustrator.
01:30:25 ◼ ► So that if you were doing something that's a niche within a niche, there might be an extension for Quark Express that would help you specifically make catalogs and to pull catalog entries from FileMaker.
01:30:38 ◼ ► And every three weeks, my company puts out a new 64-page catalog and here's an extension that'll turn a five-day process into a five-minute process or something like that.
01:30:52 ◼ ► Apple didn't make any of that stuff, but they made was the platform and they made the four or $5,000 computers and the networking technology that let printing work so much smoother and better from a Mac than it ever did from Windows in that era.
01:31:06 ◼ ► They made the platform and other companies had big, successful businesses making the tools that people used.
01:31:13 ◼ ► And I don't see why AI can't be like that, where if the platforms are Apple computers, let the other companies thrive, build a system where they can do their thing.
01:31:24 ◼ ► And I know you and our friend Ben Thompson have been on this kick and I don't disagree with it.
01:31:28 ◼ ► And I think there's something to that, especially with these new M3 Ultra chips and how good these things are potentially for AI development.
01:31:37 ◼ ► Why isn't Apple just, yes, catering towards the AI development, developer world, basically.
01:31:43 ◼ ► And I do think that there's a world in which, yeah, they can also like to my idea of ripping out and replacing with chat GBT.
01:31:51 ◼ ► It's like, in a way, it's sort of what Amazon's doing with Alexa because they have the partnership with Anthropic, right?
01:31:57 ◼ ► They're saying like, we're using our LLMs for certain things, but we're using Anthropics, Claude for other things.
01:32:17 ◼ ► The problem goes back to, and this is the problem with also what I was talking against myself with the chat GBT thing.
01:32:23 ◼ ► Going back to what we were talking about with the privacy stuff of personal information, right?
01:32:28 ◼ ► If you're going to do this for finding mom's flights and getting her home from the airport, like Apple is just probably never going to be comfortable unless it's an internal system sending out that type of data, right?
01:32:40 ◼ ► And so that again goes back to the notion like even if they did partner with people to help get something off the ground, they still probably want to have their own homegrown system at some point to be able to do this.
01:32:52 ◼ ► Yeah. And maybe it winds up part of the reason Apple didn't make all those apps back then was Apple was so much smaller that they couldn't make all those apps.
01:33:00 ◼ ► And then when Steve Jobs came back, they made their own office suite, iWork, with Keynote and Numbers and Pages, which I still use all of and think are excellent apps and exemplars of the Macintosh way of making apps, but also are not the biggest office apps in the world.
01:33:25 ◼ ► Keynote's the exception to that, where I think Keynote is still the best slide deck presentation app anybody makes.
01:33:37 ◼ ► And if you prefer using the Microsoft ones or if you prefer using Google's that run inside a browser and it's – your browser is Chrome because Chrome works better with Google documents.
01:33:57 ◼ ► And Apple can have its own entry, and you can say it's the – I would say it is the more Macintosh way to be using pages and numbers and the native idioms of the Mac interface and the support for the – all the current features of Mac OS.
01:34:17 ◼ ► But if you're doing it on a Mac, it's still – no matter what, it's a win for Apple, right?
01:34:24 ◼ ► And I think it is such – it just must be endemic to big companies to start thinking, even if you're trying to remain humble and trying to avoid hubris institutionally, to start thinking that you should be doing all of it.
01:34:44 ◼ ► I think it's happening at Apple now because they're all – yeah, once they're of a big enough size, like it's sort of a natural – yeah, element, I think, of success, right?
01:34:54 ◼ ► It's like when you think like what you've done to get to this point, well, it all had to have been the right call at least somewhat.
01:35:08 ◼ ► And then it comes down to are the people making these decisions or the people who are in the room with Tim Cook and getting him to lean their way and listen to their arguments?
01:35:22 ◼ ► I think it was the Apple joins the Navy piece of – it's a real question whether AI in general, as big a deal as it is and as obviously incredible and a breakthrough it is in the world of computing right now in this era.
01:35:39 ◼ ► Yes, and I do – I mean I think that – I think a lot of us have been sort of dancing around this topic ever since it was even rumored just leading up to WWDC of what they were going to launch because AI is moving so fast still.
01:35:54 ◼ ► It's like their – Anthropic just launched their search integration like Claude – or sorry, Mistral launched new models like a couple days ago.
01:36:10 ◼ ► And so like how on earth you can try to put your finger in the sand and just say like, yeah, we're going to like build something off of this.
01:36:18 ◼ ► It's like it's incredible that anything that ChatGPT has gotten the traction that it has given how fast just the underlying technology is moving, right?
01:36:35 ◼ ► And so they wait for sort of a market to start to come into focus a little bit and then they come in with the best product.
01:36:43 ◼ ► Tim Cook has talked about this even in recent interviews of like not the first but the best.
01:36:48 ◼ ► And the problem with that mentality in this specific world is that I find it hard to believe that it's going to slow down enough anytime soon for them to really have a good shot of making what anyone would consider to be the best.
01:37:03 ◼ ► It's because the best – what the best is starting today and releasing say in a year from now, you just can't make that target.
01:37:11 ◼ ► Like it will be a year from now, whatever you started building a year prior will be ridiculous sounding because the state of the art will have moved so far.
01:37:21 ◼ ► And so I do – and again, I really hesitate to pull the Steve Jobs would do blank out of the hat.
01:37:28 ◼ ► But I'm going to do it again and I'm even going to go so far as to say what I think he would do, which is basically a two-track strategy.
01:37:39 ◼ ► The first track is what can we do as fast as possible to make a great experience for our users that would give us, people like me and you and people who work at Apple, the experience they just want to have right now on their phones, their iPhones, their iPads, their Macs.
01:38:00 ◼ ► And I think the answer to that is very clearly to partner more openly with all the other companies and to let – I think it's over there.
01:38:11 ◼ ► It's like if you go into settings on your phone and go to Apple Intelligence, it's like under extensions, it says ChatGPT.
01:38:20 ◼ ► But make that way richer and you don't – without Apple needing to actually build that LLM technology themselves, build the framework and the APIs so that the ones that are out there can hook into it.
01:38:34 ◼ ► And I linked to a piece by my friend Gus Mueller, best known for Acorn and RetroBatch at his Flying Meat software.
01:38:43 ◼ ► But he had a great piece on his blog arguing that Apple should open up a semantic index to third-party developers and that this advantage that Apple has obviously isn't their AI tech.
01:38:56 ◼ ► Their advantage is they own and control these platforms where people have their digital lives, their contacts, their calendars, their emails, their messages to some degree, their browsing history.
01:39:11 ◼ ► And if they could just figure out a way to build a semantic index or semantic kit or whatever.
01:39:17 ◼ ► And then somebody else on Mastodon pointed out that the – which I couldn't believe I didn't think of.
01:39:32 ◼ ► Yes, they make Apple Watch and you can – a lot of people track their – get all their health statistics into the health app through their Apple Watch.
01:39:44 ◼ ► So like when you – if you're like Withings, I think is the company we have up in our kitchen.
01:39:52 ◼ ► They shouldn't be thinking, oh, well, we have to make bikes, stationary bikes like Peloton and we have to make scales and we have to make blood pressure monitors.
01:40:03 ◼ ► They should make something – which they've done, like HealthKit that people can integrate with.
01:40:08 ◼ ► I think the problem there is again going back to – and like obviously Apple was right to hone in on what their advantage was here, right?
01:40:16 ◼ ► Like you said, they have the devices that are in people's lives daily usage, like minutely usage that like only Google really has somewhat of a comparable thing.
01:40:32 ◼ ► So Apple really has a unique advantage with – particularly with the iPhone to really do something unique with regard to AI.
01:40:40 ◼ ► I think the problem hearing you – what you're talking about is that, yeah, the idea of like could you do like an AI kit for it?
01:40:48 ◼ ► I would imagine that they're worried again that this data is just too sensitive and or – and both probably that there is just too much of a negative connotation still around AI, speaking to the point of it being so early, that they don't trust – that they think their user base wouldn't be comfortable with that notion, right?
01:41:12 ◼ ► I guess that's – I think that's what they're thinking and that's what painted their stance on this in a way that's not just pure greed we would like to own at all.
01:41:32 ◼ ► Like all of your medical records, all of my medical records because the hospital system my primary doctor uses, it has an app that integrates with health kit.
01:41:40 ◼ ► My health app has like everything about me, the medications I'm on, my – that stuff is just as sensitive in a different way than AI.
01:41:54 ◼ ► I think like one of the main differences there is like it is both not necessarily a daily use case where you would share that health data with like an outside professional, right?
01:42:09 ◼ ► And you're going to have like all sorts of stuff flying out of the iPhone to the cloud, to various different clouds, right?
01:42:16 ◼ ► And Apple in their way of doing things would have to like really figure out a system to lock that data down to make sure that developers can't – not nefarious.
01:42:32 ◼ ► It's all like the leakage of like – like look at the – there was that headline the other day about like Apple had a major security problem with the passwords app, right?
01:42:58 ◼ ► But it's still – even if it's overblown, it's indicative of like all these little things that you have to like think about.
01:43:04 ◼ ► And like if you're really going to partner with all these AI companies and what they need to be most effective is really just data.
01:43:15 ◼ ► But to me, they should have to build that system out anyway even if they were only going to use their AI, their own AI.
01:43:22 ◼ ► That there should be something equivalent of HealthKit for the users to give the system this sort of explicit –
01:43:48 ◼ ► And then set Giandrea's team out and say, all right, series away, out of your hands now.
01:44:02 ◼ ► and that we can fit in with our environmental needs for the 2030 goal of being carbon neutral.
01:44:11 ◼ ► And when it's ready, that would be one option of several that you would use in this system.
01:44:17 ◼ ► And there is a sort of mentality within Apple where they want to make things now that don't compete against the others.
01:44:33 ◼ ► But I understand and defend the decision that WebKit's the only supported rendering engine on iOS for technical reasons.
01:44:45 ◼ ► But the fact that there are – that sort of thinking has expanded to more areas, that there should be one and only one way of doing something,
01:45:00 ◼ ► They've put themselves on a bad foot for doing what I'm saying they should do already by calling it Apple intelligence, right?
01:45:15 ◼ ► Not that it's the intelligence – the Apple intelligence framework for others to fill in.
01:45:21 ◼ ► Let me throw one thing that's related and then it can maybe segue into, if you want, more of a Rockwell thing because it would fall under him.
01:45:30 ◼ ► But it's like I'm of the mindset – and obviously, this is dangerous with Apple, like you're talking about calling out, like, what would Steve Jobs do if he were still alive?
01:45:38 ◼ ► This is also one of those things where it's – I think that this is a case where Apple might need to make an acquisition here and a big one.
01:45:45 ◼ ► And I have a list – I wrote down a list of companies to throw at you that I think would make the most sense.
01:45:50 ◼ ► And obviously, the steady state would just be they're not going to do that because Apple hardly ever does that, right?
01:46:07 ◼ ► And it wasn't that – and now it seems – it's a small AI round these days for what they acquired Beats for.
01:46:13 ◼ ► So the companies that I would think through here that if I were trying to go from zero to 100 overnight, I have, I think, five obvious ones.
01:46:25 ◼ ► The problem – because that, like, fits with sort of the – it feels sort of like the Apple ethos in a way with the way they talk about it.
01:46:33 ◼ ► It's a team that's spun out from – famously from OpenAI because they didn't necessarily like the way that things were going internally.
01:46:39 ◼ ► They have Mike Krieger there who people will know, like, famously co-founded Instagram, but has done many other great product work in the past.
01:46:53 ◼ ► And he's even been – he gave an interview recently where he talked about that they're not really going down the consumer path because it sort of feels like – he didn't say this, but it almost feels like AI – OpenAI sort of has that path right now.
01:47:03 ◼ ► And so their path has to be more down the enterprise route that he would love to and they would love to, in general, go down the consumer path.
01:47:14 ◼ ► So this would need to be $100 billion plus acquisition, which is, like, not just above what Apple has done historically.
01:47:25 ◼ ► And then the bigger issue there potentially is that – it's now reported because it was in a court document.
01:47:37 ◼ ► So I think the two of them owning 40% is going to block Apple from making an acquisition of that company even at $100 billion because they care much more for strategic reasons, particularly Amazon now that it's baked into Alexa.
01:47:50 ◼ ► The other – just to go through quickly, like, perplexity would be one for an obvious reason that it's both a good product but they've also done well on the search side, right?
01:47:59 ◼ ► And that's going to come into focus more coming into these next months if and when they have to break the search clause, right?
01:48:04 ◼ ► And so that gives them sort of another option potentially to be able to port something in there if they lose that $20 billion plus contract.
01:48:16 ◼ ► Now, I don't want to ding him too much because I think, like, he's a founder of a startup, like, in a big – in the most hot space.
01:48:22 ◼ ► You have to be sort of out there being boisterous and saying sort of outlandish things.
01:48:26 ◼ ► It just doesn't feel exactly like the type of thing that Apple would like to have, like, internally.
01:48:40 ◼ ► And so this is, like, we're talking $30, $40, $50 billion to actually get them to come in-house.
01:49:07 ◼ ► And you know that, in fact, I spent my whole morning writing a piece about the new EU stuff that came out yesterday.
01:49:13 ◼ ► But I don't have any spidey sense on whether that would be, like, hey, this is a feather in our cap.
01:49:20 ◼ ► We've got a great company that Apple is acquiring to be the new version of Apple intelligence.
01:49:40 ◼ ► But are they really going to be able to compete in pure firepower with the Open AI's of the world and the Anthropics now?
01:49:55 ◼ ► These two last ones are the two that I think are wild cards but are more recent and more interesting.
01:50:00 ◼ ► One is Safe Superintelligence, which is – everyone knows is the Ilya Sutskaver new company.
01:50:10 ◼ ► The other interesting layer of that is that Daniel Gross is one of the co-founders who Apple had previously acquired because he was the co-founder of Q.
01:50:17 ◼ ► And his co-founder is the one who Gurman has reported is the one who's the guy overseeing now.
01:50:27 ◼ ► And so – but Daniel Gross, when he was there, apparently helped kickstart some of the initial AI work.
01:50:32 ◼ ► And so bringing him back in-house, getting someone like Ilya Sutskaver would obviously be amazing for Apple.
01:50:37 ◼ ► And especially if they could pair him with Giandria and have a whole team there, they would be able to do quite – to basically hire any talent that they want.
01:50:43 ◼ ► The problem is they sound like they don't really want to commercialize what they're doing.
01:50:52 ◼ ► And that's probably not going to be exactly in line with what Apple is looking for here.
01:50:58 ◼ ► The last one, just to throw it out there, is Thinking Machines, which is the new Miramarati startup, which just is apparently raising their first round of funding after she left OpenAI.
01:51:11 ◼ ► And that one's interesting going back to the notion of when we were talking about Apple's potential investment in OpenAI and if she actually was sort of a key conduit for that or at least a point person.
01:51:25 ◼ ► It would still be super expensive, multi-billions of dollars, but probably not $100 billion.
01:51:30 ◼ ► And you could easily get a really excellent team that has OpenAI experience in the door quickly and hit the ground running without having to worry about what they were already building.
01:51:42 ◼ ► I'm sure they're spinning up stuff right now, but it's so early in that lifecycle that I'm sort of compelled by this idea.
01:51:47 ◼ ► I don't know if they would actually obviously go for it, but I could see like a world in which they overlap.
01:51:51 ◼ ► And the last thing I'd say with all of these and the notion why I think Apple actually needs to do this.
01:51:57 ◼ ► It goes back to the point of what we were talking about before where it's like I think that they need a mentality change at the company.
01:52:11 ◼ ► But I think like it's worth that shot and Apple obviously has the capital to potentially do it.
01:52:27 ◼ ► I think you're more juiced in, especially on safe superintelligence and thinking machines than I am.
01:52:31 ◼ ► But I do get that impression, not just that safe superintelligence isn't interested in monetizing or making a business out of it, but they're not even thinking about productizing.
01:52:43 ◼ ► And the example I jotted down is, for example, Wikipedia, a true triumph, maybe the triumph of the worldwide web, that the organization that best espouses the ideals of the open Internet and the open web isn't a commercial for-profit enterprise, that part of what makes them who they are is that they're a foundation.
01:53:22 ◼ ► And I get the feeling that safe superintelligence, they're not looking to do the Wikipedia of AI.
01:53:35 ◼ ► But that actually brings into my mind, it's almost like they could do the exact same deal that Microsoft tried to do with open AI.
01:53:40 ◼ ► And then the problem became that open AI got a hit product, and then it became the conflict between the two, right?
01:53:46 ◼ ► Because they thought that they were going to go for AGI, and that's why they had the deal.
01:53:58 ◼ ► Yeah, maybe, and maybe if they're really not that resistant to productizing and packaging the technology in a way that actually is useful in profound new ways to as many people as possible, but needs to be done with trust that Apple is the company that they would trust to do it the most.
01:54:18 ◼ ► And that Apple, as much as you can argue that Tim Cook is a bean counter, he obviously doesn't count the beans on everything, right?
01:54:29 ◼ ► I know they remember last year when they were like somebody, actually the guy who restarted the Pebble thing had his beeper thing that was backwards engineering a way to send iMessages and stuff.
01:54:40 ◼ ► And it's like the whole iMessage network just runs for free, and you just get to use it if you own Apple devices.
01:54:48 ◼ ► It is like a benefit, like a membership benefit, like in a way that like the reason to get an Amex isn't to go into the lounge at the airport.
01:55:04 ◼ ► Hopefully, they're not going to, but it's like you just use iMessage and send images and pictures and video and communicate, and Apple just eats the cost of that.
01:55:13 ◼ ► They eat the cost of many things knowing that people keep buying $1,000 phones and $2,000 MacBooks and somebody out there is buying.
01:55:23 ◼ ► And so that leads – that puts my brain in the notion of like going back to the Microsoft and OpenAI thing.
01:55:28 ◼ ► Like what if with safe superintelligence – and again, we're throwing out this like they're going to do it.
01:55:38 ◼ ► We talked about why Mistral, like they don't have the big one, which is potentially problematic.
01:55:45 ◼ ► What if Apple is safe superintelligence – they don't acquire them, but they're their main benefactor, right?
01:55:51 ◼ ► They're basically pouring hundreds of billions of dollars over a long period of time into the company to do their work and then give them the models back to productize what Apple needs to productize.
01:56:02 ◼ ► And correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean I'm pretty sure I'm right, that nobody is making money from any of this stuff yet, right?
01:56:29 ◼ ► Not that there's nobody – and in fact, OpenAI is growing revenue from it is what's making valuations go up because people can smell, well, I don't know if there's revenue.
01:56:39 ◼ ► People are willing to pay, but it's nowhere near enough to cover the cost of actually continuing to push the edge forward.
01:56:58 ◼ ► This is – however long he stays, the way he navigates through this is almost certainly going to be how he's remembered for his final chapter at Apple, right?
01:57:12 ◼ ► As you and I speak today, March 2025, it's never been more – it's as uncertain as it has been.
01:57:26 ◼ ► That's super interesting because that sort of reminds me of like Bob Iger at Disney, right?
01:57:36 ◼ ► And it seems like now he's been able to right the ship again to the point where he's apparently going to step away within the next year or so.
01:57:43 ◼ ► And Cook has not indicated that he is anytime soon except that he's given interviews with like Stephen Levy and stuff where he sort of like talks about legacy more and starts to indicate that maybe –
01:57:53 ◼ ► and Gurman, of course, is reporting on are people waiting in the wings, John Ternus and stuff potentially to step in there.
01:58:01 ◼ ► Like this is interesting because it almost like resets a little bit of the clock for Cook in that he can't leave in the middle of this.
01:58:27 ◼ ► And Apple does have enough money and enough ongoing revenue that no matter which one they chose, if they chose one, it would not be a bet the company move, right?
01:58:51 ◼ ► They bought Activision for $60 billion and I think everybody at the time, including me, was like, I don't know.
01:58:55 ◼ ► It seems like a lot for a video game company no matter how popular some of the games are.
01:59:10 ◼ ► But I do think there's the question of, is one of these, like, worth the extra premium because they're going to be the winner?
01:59:17 ◼ ► And if Apple doesn't do it, they're in trouble because the winner – you know, I know there's this whole argument that if you get to AGI first, then AGI starts building the next generations of artificial intelligence itself.
01:59:31 ◼ ► And the first one to get there and has that system, you'll never catch up because all of a sudden they're the only one who's operating at the speed of computers rather than at the very slow speed of humans driving these generations.
01:59:46 ◼ ► And if so, is it worth – even if you think, best guess, it's probably only a 20% chance that it's going to work out that way.
01:59:53 ◼ ► But if it's a one out of five chance that if we're not the ones who own it, we're screwed, go home.
02:00:03 ◼ ► Like, you're not going to be able to know the future, obviously, like, of which of these is going to be the winner if there were to be one.
02:00:10 ◼ ► But the answer there I think is just so multi-pronged where it's like – again, I go back to the notion of it helps you both move faster, but it helps you internally, culturally, like, get a mentality shift, right, around what you need to do here.
02:00:28 ◼ ► But remember, everything that Apple is trying to do in, like, robotics and everything else, potentially, like, this all would feed directly into that as well, where it's not just betting the farm on building a new Siri, potentially.
02:00:42 ◼ ► Right. No, it's – and I've been saying this for years, and I know that before there were more rumors that they're actually working on actual robotics.
02:00:55 ◼ ► I don't know that they're going to look like humans, like C-3PO, or will they be weird shapes like R2-D2.
02:01:04 ◼ ► But I think part of the genius of George Lucas's vision for Star Wars in 1977 is he had both of those robots, right?
02:01:16 ◼ ► But the idea of having – not just having voices we speak to on these devices that answer our questions, but helpers who do things for us, who go get me.
02:01:29 ◼ ► It would be great if I had an assistant who just would come down here to my podcast cave with a fresh, cold seltzer for me right now.
02:01:51 ◼ ► But, yeah, the Apple research, the arm, like the Pixar lamp analogous arm, that thing, again, I'm surprised.
02:01:59 ◼ ► I noticed that they actually were able to – I know that part of the deal is like sort of open source talking about your work in public.
02:02:13 ◼ ► That they would – you think like, oh, they have this weird robot thing that sits on your desk.
02:02:19 ◼ ► But it's like when you actually watch that video, you can see like, oh, this just brings a smile to your face, this type of thing.
02:02:29 ◼ ► Right, and it's that Apple is the place that would draw people who are prone – drawn to that type of research.
02:02:36 ◼ ► Right, and again, I'll just – again, I'm not trying to pick on them, but that somebody who really wants to devote their post-doctorate AI advanced research studies to making a Luxo-like lamp that can move in a motive way isn't going to go work at XAI for Elon Musk at Grok, right?
02:02:56 ◼ ► That's just not the company that's going to – that's just not the company that's going to build a device that expresses Pixar-like kind, gentleness, and emotions.
02:03:26 ◼ ► And somebody was mad that they canceled OpenDoc and really kind of skewered – it wasn't really a question.
02:03:37 ◼ ► And part of his answer, which was so thoughtful, was you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.
02:03:45 ◼ ► You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try and sell it.
02:03:51 ◼ ► I've probably made this mistake more than anybody, and I've got the scar tissue to prove it.
02:03:55 ◼ ► And we have to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, and it started with what incredible benefits can we give to the customer?
02:04:03 ◼ ► Not starting with, let's sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have, and then how are we going to market that?
02:04:18 ◼ ► And I kind of feel like all of the AI technology, including all the companies you mentioned, is still at that state.
02:04:28 ◼ ► And I do what I do and talk about what I – and write about what I write about because I'm enthralled by technology.
02:04:40 ◼ ► You, me, everyone that was watching WWDC, my initial gut reaction was like, Apple's doing it again.
02:04:50 ◼ ► You need to take the cool technology and make it work for actual use cases in people's real lives.
02:05:01 ◼ ► And going back to the notion of, is that because it's just too early for Apple to actually be involved here?
02:05:16 ◼ ► Right, and I kind of feel like the advantage Apple has with all of the cash that they have and the profit that they have and the credibility they have with Wall Street isn't that they can make one big bet to buy their way out of this.
02:05:35 ◼ ► But at the meantime, let's spread the bets and make a platform for AI from other companies.
02:05:40 ◼ ► So if one of these other companies wins, we still come along for the ride because people are using it on our system.
02:05:48 ◼ ► I go back to, though, my favorite part of your post is actually ties into this in a way where it is basically the notion that what Jobs actually brought back to Apple when he came back was engendering a level of trust again within the product.
02:06:06 ◼ ► After it had been destroyed, like we talked about with Scully and the Newton, even though the Newton was good at the end, it didn't matter because the trust had been destroyed.
02:06:13 ◼ ► The single most important thing that Jobs did was bring back the customer trust to Apple that they were going to make great products and that you could know that when they release something, maybe not every time, but more often than not than with any other company, you knew that this was going to be a good product.
02:06:31 ◼ ► And the real risk of what they just did here with this AI fiasco is that they're destroying that credibility.
02:06:54 ◼ ► And all of a sudden, a year or two from now, when they do have great AI, and they want to say the same things about it, nobody believes them.
02:07:13 ◼ ► If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.
02:07:20 ◼ ► And I think that's sort of what Apple talked themselves into with these AI features, right?
02:07:34 ◼ ► If it's not a real product that you can at least demonstrate, let alone sell, but demonstrate before you can sell it,
02:07:49 ◼ ► That is a fun video in hindsight to watch, but it's the epitome of this, which is the knowledge navigator thing, right?
02:07:59 ◼ ► And again, it's sort of interesting because it's the world more or less of where we are right now.
02:08:09 ◼ ► And at the time, their computers were never – their own computers were never in a worse competitive state compared to the competition.
02:08:20 ◼ ► So before we go, I did say I think we should come back to it with Rockwell and Vision OS and Vision.
02:08:29 ◼ ► Like, hey, just to – this is not my opinion, but the sort of knee-jerk opinion to the news is, okay, sure, Apple needed a kick in the pants with Siri and new leadership.
02:08:42 ◼ ► So far, so good, bringing in the guy who spent the last seven or eight years to bring us Vision OS and Vision, which everybody is describing as a dud and a failure in the market, seems like a really curious state.
02:09:20 ◼ ► And a couple of the comments I got from people at Apple, not people who've worked with them directly, but it's like other product people have been like, yeah, finally.
02:09:57 ◼ ► Not how heavy it is, or is it $3,500 or $600 like metas, but is this even really a platform?
02:10:06 ◼ ► Is this a thing that's going to be around, or is it a total dead end and nothing really matters until we get to actual glasses that you see through and just sort of have a heads-up display in there?
02:10:34 ◼ ► But there was news, I think, from counterpoint research that the VR market is shrinking again.
02:10:54 ◼ ► Meta is eating up more of the market because, as you noted, they have the – they both have the right price points.
02:10:59 ◼ ► They've done a lot of work, and I think the product is in a better place than it's ever been right now.
02:11:07 ◼ ► Even though they own a huge percentage of the market, it's not a big enough market for even them to care about, really, from a business perspective.
02:11:14 ◼ ► And so Apple, at a tiny sliver, given their $3,500 selling point, like, why on earth are they playing in this market?
02:11:22 ◼ ► And I do think, like – and this speaks to sort of going into the Rockwell discussion of, like, from my perspective, having had Division Pro since it launched, obviously it's a great technical marvel, and it speaks well to the people who made it.
02:11:38 ◼ ► Like, I don't think that – like – and again, that sort of goes to the notion of, like, who is making these calls, ultimately?
02:11:55 ◼ ► And they'll say until they're blue in the face that we knew it wasn't going to be a massive iPhone scale hit.
02:12:25 ◼ ► I keep going back to the original Macintosh in 1984, which in inflation-adjusted dollars was, like, $7,500 today.
02:12:38 ◼ ► So you're probably closer to $10,000 in today's money just to get a Macintosh with 128 kilobytes of RAM that – at a time where, like, 18 months later, it was obsoleted technically by the Fat Mac, which had four times more RAM at a time when it was –
02:13:14 ◼ ► And it was because it was the year 1998 – or 1988 when Microsoft went back to that with Office 97.
02:13:29 ◼ ► And I don't think – I think most people who were early Macintosh users got theirs in, like, 87 or 88 or even 89 or even 1990 still counts in hindsight as being early.
02:13:42 ◼ ► But would there have been the Mac of 1989, like, when the Mac SE30 came out, if it hadn't shipped in the horribly too early state in 1984?
02:14:12 ◼ ► Unless you would make the argument to trying to square the circle there that basically you need the Vision Pro to be able to do the glasses, like, at some point.
02:14:22 ◼ ► Right, and if they have a plan forward from here to glasses, and if there is a hint that they do, it's that they called the platform Vision.
02:14:34 ◼ ► And if they – I mean, because – and Gurman's reported on it, and it's just such an obvious use case of making glasses, like the Meta Wayfarer things, but with actual computers in them that can show something to you in the lenses.
02:14:55 ◼ ► If they have a path forward from Vision Pro of last year to those glasses on a continuation of this platform, that would be a huge win.
02:15:09 ◼ ► And I know people – it's not computing and platform building, but there's the whole, hey, if this is so great for immersive 3D content, where's the content library?
02:15:42 ◼ ► He wants, like, a single camera, like, so you feel like you're in the crowd or whatnot and just would be simpler than cutting a thing.
02:16:13 ◼ ► And it almost – it almost makes the entire thing, like, me rethink, like, that this is – if they can get more of these out there that they can actually sell.
02:16:26 ◼ ► But if they can get it down to $2,000 and eventually to $1,500, I think that they can actually make this into something.
02:16:32 ◼ ► And that by the time that happens, like, another 18 months from now or two years from now, and then when there is one for $2,000 or $2,500 or $1,500 or wherever, the one that doesn't have Pro in the name.
02:16:45 ◼ ► That's – however much of a Clube Vision is that they envision this platform going all the way through to actual glasses, the Pro is them screaming, we're going to have one that's not Pro eventually.
02:16:59 ◼ ► And by the time that happens, there is this, like, hey, you can go see Metallica concert.
02:17:05 ◼ ► You can go see – you name Beyonce and Taylor Swift and whoever else might be in the library of concerts by then.
02:17:12 ◼ ► That's how you ship at that point with the library that people think should have been there already for this.
02:17:27 ◼ ► But the – hey, Rockwell might be the right guy for this, is if you at least describe what Vision Pro is.
02:17:39 ◼ ► There is a very clear way of describing what Vision Pro is supposed to do and what it's supposed to be like.
02:17:59 ◼ ► They built a bunch of these apps like Notes and Mail and Messages that, you know, have this new look and feel.
02:18:18 ◼ ► Like, put aside how many units they're selling and how many people are selling it, you know, compared to Meta or whoever.
02:18:54 ◼ ► So, I think if there's a criticism of Vision Pro and I think the – you said it earlier.
02:19:13 ◼ ► I don't know if that's proven out yet, but I admit at this point it's already a bit of a – my take is a bit of a long-shot bet.
02:19:20 ◼ ► But he did build the thing they set out to build and pushed the state-of-the-art forward in so many ways.
02:19:27 ◼ ► And that whole R1 chip to get the latency down is the sort of hard engineering work of – and doing the Steve Jobs thing where you're not – you don't start with the technology and build a product around it.
02:19:41 ◼ ► It's that you have this incredibly hard problem of we need to get the milliseconds of latency down below what's technically possible.
02:19:52 ◼ ► Otherwise, we're all going to – too many people are going to be sick when they use this.
02:19:59 ◼ ► And actually, to put that back at you, I think the best way to frame that and why Rockwell might be the right fit for this is because the Vision Pro, what its problem is, is almost the exact opposite of what the AI problem is, right?
02:20:34 ◼ ► They even changed the finger thing mid-Vision OS update to make it a little bit different.
02:20:52 ◼ ► And so I kind of, that's my argument that I think this might be really a sharp move and
02:21:03 ◼ ► We know all of the things that we say to Siri or type to Siri now that we want to work.
02:21:09 ◼ ► Apple's done the benefit of making the concept videos of how it's supposed to work in the future.
02:21:17 ◼ ► And I think he has, with Vision OS, has done an exemplary job of building the thing he set out
02:21:33 ◼ ► And the latency problem is such a terrific example of not, well, we can do this and we can do that,
02:21:41 ◼ ► but it's going to have like 20 seconds, 20 milliseconds of latency, and a lot of people
02:21:52 ◼ ► And if we have to build a whole custom silicon layer to do it, we'll just invent it and we'll
02:21:57 ◼ ► Again, that sort of thinking obviously hasn't been going on inside Siri, where it's, oh,
02:22:04 ◼ ► it's going to take like 10 seconds to get an answer on when the first day of Major League
02:22:15 ◼ ► And if whatever we need to do to make it happen, let's build it out and make it happen.
02:22:32 ◼ ► So we can sort of end on a more positive note than just saying like Apple's in disarray
02:22:41 ◼ ► I still think, and I'm sure you agree, like it's still going to take a lot of time for them
02:23:05 ◼ ► And here they've got to sort of rebuild an airplane in this while it's already, I guess it's not
02:23:39 ◼ ► And I kind of feel that, and again, I can't say I know Mike Rockwell personally, but I've
02:23:45 ◼ ► had him on my show twice, gotten to talk to him backstage and in product briefings around
02:23:59 ◼ ► Like you said, he got there in 2015, but I think he is more of a Steve-like person than
02:24:17 ◼ ► And if it takes too long, it takes too long, or it takes from the perspective of the fact
02:24:22 ◼ ► And I mean, I like if he can actually be, yeah, I mean, the decision maker, he obviously
02:24:34 ◼ ► But it's like, as long as he is able to have a correct finger on the pulse, he would have
02:24:44 ◼ ► But, you know, he'll basically presumably use the next several weeks now that they've already
02:24:49 ◼ ► delayed this, they bought themselves a little bit of time, at least to sort of get a lay
02:25:05 ◼ ► Including those fancy pants Sony displays in front of each eye and Vision Pro and the display
02:25:18 ◼ ► Remember that company, wasn't it a display company where like 10 years ago they were going
02:25:28 ◼ ► Yeah, and they built a bunch of machines and spend a bunch of money and they went bankrupt,
02:25:43 ◼ ► Maybe figure out which part do we need to make and do our own and which part can we buy or
02:25:52 ◼ ► But with nothing but the singular vision of here's the product experience we have in mind
02:26:10 ◼ ► The only thing I would say against that is that, and it's to one of our earlier discussion
02:26:16 ◼ ► points, it being potentially too early, but it's more that, again, the technology is moving
02:26:22 ◼ ► They have to make like a call without knowing really like, is this technology so fundamental,
02:26:48 ◼ ► If that whole path of silicon development hadn't panned out, Apple would just be buying chips
02:26:55 ◼ ► They'd just be buying CPUs from them instead and gritting their teeth and maybe having hit the
02:27:01 ◼ ► reset button, bought somebody else five years later to try to do their own because they've
02:27:08 ◼ ► But the benefit, again, the benefit of modern Apple today versus 1997 Apple then is that
02:27:16 ◼ ► they were close to bankruptcy and had to, like, if the next acquisition hadn't worked out, that
02:27:36 ◼ ► We get one chance to make a bet here and that's it for the future of the whole company.